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A Lot Like Love

Like most mediocre Hollywood fare, "A Lot Like Love" doesn't even care that its outcome is assured and the audience has little reason to stay in the theater more than five minutes.

f you want to understand what right-wingers are getting so hot under the collar about with regards to morality and movies, you need only watch about five minutes of "A Lot Like Love."

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm extremely pro when it comes to premarital sex, especially when it involves me, but one has to seriously wonder about a lot of small details when Emily (Amanda Peet) essentially barges in on Oliver (Ashton Kutcher) while he's using the airplane facilities and fucks his brains out. That's right, he opens the door, she enters, and they have sex, all apparently because she was feeling either frisky or blue following a romantic breakup just before she boarded the plane.

The first question that comes to mind is this one: Just how sane is a woman who'd screw a stranger in an airplane bathroom? Is that the kind of woman with whom one would be apt to develop a lifelong friendship/love affair? And there's no evidence that Oliver is prepared for such a thing, so this is clearly unsafe sex, which seems a dicey proposition. I have to say that if I was Oliver and this goth chick barged in on me in the bathroom wanting to have sex, I'd toss her out. Call me a prude if you want, but odds are that's a recipe for catching an entire cocktail of oozy venereal diseases in one sitting.

Actually, that wasn't the first question that came to my mind watching the film; it was simply the first one that came to my mind writing this review. The actual question I thought of watching the film was this: How the hell do you screw in one of those bathrooms? I can barely pee in one of them and then if there's turbulence, it's all but impossible. So you combine the unsafe sex with a really uncomfortable position that likely involves several months of physical therapy, and none of it seems very realistic.

Much like his previous film, "Calendar Girls", director Nigel Cole's efforts are overwhelmingly insignificant. We witness about seven years of Emily and Oliver's relationship and they dance around the fact that they should be together. Like most mediocre Hollywood fare, "A Lot Like Love" doesn't even care that its outcome is assured and the audience has little reason to stay in the theater more than five minutes. This explains the painfully predictable ending, which falls upon a standard romantic comedy cliché of mistaken identity that is so transparent as to be stupefying.